Chickens

Dr. Seuss' "Green Eggs and Ham" isn't a totally absurd title. Araucana hens lay green (and blue) eggs. * Ever since President Bush sent tons of dark chicken meat to Russia in 1991, citizens have referred to the hindquarters as "Bush legs." * A French acrobat once fried eggs and ate them while walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. * According to theologians, the book of Genesis answers the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg.

Bacteria levels in uncooked chicken are "grossly understated" by federal officials, according to an internal U.S. Department of Agriculture document recently published by a food industry trade journal. The memo found fault with established methods of calculating the number of bacteria, including salmonella, present on chickens at processing plants.

A tractor-trailer rig lost its cargo today, spilling 5,000 live chickens onto Interstate 70, state police said. "Chickens are everywhere," a police dispatcher said after the pre-dawn accident in southwestern Pennsylvania. Police closed a stretch of the highway until the chickens--dead or alive--were rounded up.

Pam King's San Marino home has solar panels, a drought-resistant yard and an urban farm. Now she'd like some chickens to go with it. The city known as the wealthiest, quietest suburban enclave in the San Gabriel Valley doesn't allow residents to keep farm animals, but that may soon change. This month King asked the San Marino City Council to allow chickens on residential properties, and council members ordered a staff report. If San Marino goes to the birds, it would join Pasadena, South Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge, which allow residents to keep fowl under strict guidelines.

Egg City in Moorpark, once the world's largest chicken ranch, won a labor victory Friday when a state board upheld a 1986 vote by the farm's employees to end representation by the United Farm Workers. "We're delighted that the vote the people made has been upheld, and we hope the facility will be able to move forward," said Richard Carrot, one of Egg City's owners. The State Agricultural Labor Relations Board's decision affirmed the findings made in June by an administrative judge.

The chicken has joined the likes of people, chimpanzees, mice and the roundworm with its genetic code mapped out and published for all to see. It is the first bird genome to be mapped. Richard Wilson and his colleagues at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis assembled the genome of the red jungle fowl, known scientifically as Gallus gallus.

State police and highway workers chased about 1,000 chickens from a highway Thursday after crates containing the birds fell from a truck. No attempt was made to capture the chickens. "Once they're out, they're gone," State Police Cpl. Howard Sampson said. The truck driver, Steven Lock of Ansonia, Ohio, was rounding a curve on Interstate 70 when a strap broke, dumping crates holding about half of his cargo of 8,000 chickens. Not all of the crates broke open, police said.

About 90 U.S. Navy personnel arrived on Australia's southeastern coast to help slaughter 1.5 million chickens to control the country's worst outbreak of animal disease. Chickens are being slaughtered on 30 farms in the Mangrove Mountain Ridge area to stop an epidemic of Newcastle disease, named for a nearby city. About 600 people are involved in the plan to protect Australia's billion-dollar poultry industry. The virus is not believed to pose a risk to humans.

A California biotechnology firm says it has developed a technique to genetically modify chickens to potentially produce drugs in their eggs for human diseases. The technology, devised at the privately owned Origen Therapeutics and at UC Davis, lets scientists permanently alter the genetics of chicken eggs and sperm so the new traits are passed to succeeding generations, according to the report in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

Re "What if Someone Went Looking for Your Nuggets?," Jan. 16: Dana Parson's recent column about the Carl's Jr. commercial is a fair, well-done article. It may seem absurd to find wrong in a commercial that is obviously intending to be humorous, not offensive, but is it really so absurd to object to the poking and prodding of an animal that in many studies has been found to be both an intelligent and sensitive creature. Objectifying animals leads to mistreatment, just as objectifying humans does.